Practical Ways to Incorporate Mindfulness in Your Class

Teaching mindfulness to students in a sustainable and impactful way includes instruction in some basic brain science along with incrementally less structured meditation activities. Do you want your students to reap the self-regulation and focus enhancing benefits of mindfulness? Even more important, do you want to help your trauma-affected students rewire their brains for academic success? Keep reading to learn an incremental approach to teaching mindfulness to your students. Disclaimer: always give students the option to opt out and make sure they know they do not have to close their eyes if they don't want to. If they don't, guide them to focus on one point in front of them with lowered eyelids. 

Justifying Mindfulness

Getting your students to take mindfulness seriously starts with teaching them why it works. I have a few other blog posts and videos on how mindfulness actually works. You can head over to those and learn more. Or, you can do a quick Google search to read just how it is that mindfulness can boost learning readiness and self-regulation.

How to teach the link between mindfulness and achievement:
Have students create models of the brain. Teach them how the brain develops from the bottom up and what parts of the brain control heart rate and breathing. Discuss how we can build up the focusing parts of the brain to better control our body’s physical response and, over time, gain more self-control. Be creative and incorporate mindfulness activities into your instruction on mindfulness. A fun idea for using mindfulness to show students how it works is to get them wound up, maybe playing a game that involves movement. Get their hearts going faster and their breathing rates up. Have them try to do a difficult puzzle or do something academic. Then, have them all sit in a comfortable place, dim the lights, and do an easy and highly structured guided meditation (check the list below). They can try the challenging cognitive activity again after the meditation. 

Start STructured and Slowly Increase Challenge

Once you teach students what it is and why it works, it’s imperative to make mindfulness a part of your daily classroom routine. It may work best as a warm up at the beginning of class or, if you have a homeroom, a study hall, or if you teach elementary, it could be in one of the less structured times of day. I know we’re so strapped for time but the benefits of incorporating mindfulness, especially for survivors of trauma, greatly outweighs the small chunk of time it will take out of your instructional day. 

Next, I like to start with the easiest and most engaging types of mindfulness activities and keep each day’s mindfulness activity a bit different from the day before. That second part is so that I can keep their interest. Below, find a sequential and incrementally less structured list of mindfulness activities to slowly build stamina and buy-in. 

1. My favorite- the chocolate meditation! Use a script (find one with an easy Google search), use a recording of someone else on YouTube, or make a guide up as you go along to get your students really noticing their eating experience. For this meditation and for any other eating meditation, I like to find something in a wrapper. I guide students from simply thinking about what’s inside, exploring features of the wrapper, and feeling the food through the packaging, all the way through looking at it unwrapped, feeling it unwrapped (quickly so that it doesn’t melt), and slowly putting it on the tongue. Then, students pay attention to what it feels like. Are there features they saw that they can feel with their mouth? You should guide them through noticing different things about it: what is the texture, what does it feel like, what does it taste like? If they move it around their mouth, does the flavor change? Eventually guide them to chew and swallow. A fun perk is to compare this experience with eating another piece of food or chocolate that they do not attend to in the same way. Then they can compare the experiences. 
2. Visualization: for this activity, students should sit in a chair or on the floor with their backs supported and in an upright position. They can close their eyes and you can dim the lights. Then, either find a visualization online or make one up on your own. Visualizations should be verbally guided and imagined experiences in which you or the online voice “walk” students through an imagined scene. I used to use this as a science class warm up and have students imagine themselves at the bottom of the sea, on a weightless spacewalk, or anything else related to the content. If you teach English, you can have them visualize themselves in a story. If you teach History, they can walk through a historical scene. As obvious as it may seem, whatever you talk them through, make sure they know they should be imagining it in their minds as if they were there in the first person. 
3. Body scan meditation: For a body scan meditation, either you or a video or audio track guides students to pay attention to and relax one part of their body at a time. 
4. Touch points: similar to a body scan, this meditation has students focus specifically on one body part and teaches them that they can focus on that body part in times of stress to help calm them down. 
5. Guided walking meditation: using a mobile device and headphones, students can walk slowly around campus, the halls, or the classroom and attend to each footstep making contact with the ground. Another type of walking meditation includes telling students to notice everything they hear for 30 seconds, then everything they see for another 30 seconds, and so on. Then, after each 30 second interval, have them share out what they noticed. 
6. Guided breathing meditation: although this is one of the most common forms of meditation, in my opinion, it is one of the most difficult, especially when it is not very structured. By that I mean that if I’m listening to a breathing guided meditation and the guide tells me to pay attention to my breath and then stops talking, my mind wanders and I totally forget what I’m doing. Now, the whole goal of growing stamina is so you get better at less structured meditations. So, always remind yourself and your students that the benefits of meditation come when we lose focus and bring our attention back to whatever we are supposed to be focusing on. 
7. Unguided meditations: Unguided meditations can take the forms of any of the ones listed above and simply have no voice guiding your thoughts and actions. As I mentioned above, the more you and your students practice mindfulness, the better you will get at noticing when attention moves away from your target and then you can simply bring it back. These moments of refocusing are the key to strengthening focus and attention when it comes to academic activities. ​​

Conclusion

There are so many ways to incorporate mindfulness into your classroom. Start by making sure students know what it is and why it works. Then, be sure to make it a consistent part of your school day. Without that piece, it won’t have the long-term impacts on attention and achievement. Take your pick from the list above but remember that the most highly structured activities will feel easier for your students. Only when they really get the hang of bringing their attention back to the present focus will they be successful with less guided activities. ​Also, it is really important for you to have your own mindfulness practice for this to work. 

Check out this supplementary video!